In the end, only the United States, with its fortunate geopolitical advantages, its unique position of international leadership, and its huge qualitative edge in nuclear matters (to say nothing of other technologies) can meaningfully lead any kind of change in global norms about the purpose and meaning of nuclear arms. This will require difficult and politically unpopular choices, material sacrifice, steadfast diplomacy, and the courage to assert America’s confidence in its ability to lead and protect the international order without nuclear threats. But the creation of a post-nuclear age will not happen without a fundamental rejection both of beliefs about nuclear weapons and ideas about what constitutes “national security” in the twenty-first century.
Overview
Concepts about nuclear weapons, rather than the weapons themselves, are central to the problem of security in a nuclear world. Consequently, this book is about the current state of U.S. nuclear doctrine and strategy, the effects of American thinking about nuclear weapons on international security, and the various ways that the United States might reduce the overall threat of nuclear weapons to the international community. This book is not about nuclear technology, nor is it meant to present a comprehensive history of the Cold War or the nuclear arms race. Those books and articles have already been written over the past three decades, as seminal contributions by Robert Jervis, Lawrence Freedman, John Newhouse, and others, and they are works to which this one owes a clear intellectual debt.
Instead, this study is aimed at reducing the centrality of nuclear weapons in U.S. security strategy in the twenty-first century. Of course, it is impossible to understand the current nuclear situation without understanding the intellectual and physical legacy of the Cold War. The U.S. missiles that stand on alert at this moment were designed and built in the 1960s, and were the result of a series of strategic debates and decisions that now seem like ancient history to students and specialists alike. We live in a world that was shaped by the Cold War, and engaging current policies about nuclear weapons means unavoidably engaging the thought and work that laid their foundations decades ago. Accordingly, the next chapter of this book will present an overview of U.S. nuclear strategy from the end of World War II to the end of the Cold War.
Chapter 2 recounts the disarray and confusion that settled over U.S. nuclear doctrine after the Soviet collapse. Three times since the Cold War, the United States has tried to engage in a full review of its nuclear doctrine. Each time, these efforts failed to move U.S. nuclear thinking beyond formulations that represented an amalgam of outdated intellectual constructs and stubborn rationalizations for existing weapons systems. These missed opportunities repeatedly produced cautious documents that served, in the main, to reaffirm the status quo and defend the right to use nuclear weapons.
Eastern and Western planners alike were obsessed by an arms race that was dominated by numbers and capabilities, and so they routinely contemplated thousands of nuclear strikes during a world war. Whether even the most courageous or iron-willed leaders would have been able to make some sort of sense out of a situation that would likely have degenerated into uncontrollable global chaos within minutes was a question uneasily subordinated to the all-encompassing task of deterrence. With the Cold War gone, however, so is the need to arm for protracted nuclear war, and Chapter 3 argues for reforming U.S. nuclear doctrine around the concept of “minimum deterrence,” the notion that even the largest nuclear powers can be deterred by the threat of only a very few strategic nuclear strikes.
Minimum deterrence is increasingly growing into official policy in the major nuclear powers, and is already the foundation of nuclear defense in Britain, France, and the People’s Republic of China. Still, a U.S. doctrine of minimum deterrence needs to be given greater coherence and more explicit recognition if it is to enhance the international stability required both for further nuclear reductions and a lasting nuclear peace. The United States remains the leader of the wealthiest and most powerful military alliance in human history, and neither the United States nor NATO faces any severe nuclear danger. While Russia has the ability to destroy the United States and its European allies, and China could inflict grievous damage to Eurasia and North America, there is no threat remotely like that posed by the former Soviet Union in the twenty-first century, nor is one likely to emerge over even the longest horizon, and there is no reason to continue to act, speak, and spend as if there were.
If nightmares are measured not by their intensity but by their likelihood, then the most terrifying scenario is a nuclear crisis with a small nation. After the Soviet implosion, the United States found itself a superpower able to destroy the Earth itself but paralyzed in the face of lesser threats. Chapter 4 will examine this problem of small nuclear powers, a far more complicated dilemma than it might appear—and more than U.S. policymakers have been willing to admit.
The United States has long relied on the policy of “ambiguity,” in which Washington has intentionally left unclear how it might respond to a chemical or biological attack, or perhaps to the use only of a single nuclear weapon, by a small nation. This lack of clarity leaves the door open for nuclear use, but without forcing the Americans to make threats that could come back to haunt them if those threats have to be fulfilled. Meanwhile, rogue regimes and their leaders are ostensibly deterred by their uncertainty about the consequences of their actions. But is any threat to use nuclear weapons against small states in crowded regions either credible or morally defensible? It is one thing to contemplate a strike on the Soviet Union during World War III in a desperate bid for survival; it is another entirely to contemplate the massive, and perhaps grossly disproportionate, dislocation and havoc that would be created by engaging in nuclear strikes in small, densely populated areas such as East Asia or the Middle East.
Simple promises of nuclear retaliation against small aggressors are too facile. In a large-scale exchange with a peer, the need for action is immediate and the later consequences are a distant consideration in the heat of a fight for national survival. Smaller nations, however, cannot threaten the U.S. system of government or the American state, and the decision to use nuclear weapons, except in dire cases of preemption of additional nuclear strikes, will turn heavily on the proportionality and cost of the consequences. Chapter 5 will consider the costs of nuclear responses and the alternative of conventional retaliation. If nuclear proliferation is to be stopped, the United States and its allies—and, one might argue, the Russians as well—are going to have to devote more thought to how rogues and their clients can be deterred or their arsenals destroyed without resorting to nuclear force.
The final chapter will consider the price of the proposals for nuclear peace put forward in this study. These costs, both financial and political, will be considerable, but not insurmountable. The most wrenching questions, however, will not be over dollars and weapons, but diplomacy, sacrifice, and self-image. Will the American people and their representatives be willing to become more pacifist and more warlike at the same time? On the one hand, ending the nuclear addiction means not only divesting the United States of large numbers of nuclear weapons, but ending almost seventy years of reliance on the absolute power of nuclear arms. On the other hand, it means that the United States must be ready to make good on real threats of military force—and accept the casualties it will produce among our own soldiers—against countries and groups that refuse to overcome their nuclear obsessions.
False Choices
Since the collapse of the USSR, questions over the future of nuclear weapons and their role in U.S. national security have been plagued by false choices. Nuclear pacifism or nuclear aggression? Missile defenses, or surrender to nuclear blackmail? Abolition of nuclear weapons, or uncontrolled proliferation? We no longer face the choice of “Red or dead”; indeed, even during the Cold War this was an artificial dichotomy in a world where the main question was, or should have been, how to avoid a nuclear war, no matter how it originated.33 But that does not mean the years of difficult choices are now over.
The underlying questions about nuclear force have remained much the same since 1945. What is the actual political role of nuclear weapons? Do they have any military utility?